Consonantal lexical form of Hebrew verbs

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi ya,

 

  I am preparing Hebrew flashcards from Accordance. It's reached the stage where I need to drill vocab.

  Last night after resolving some silly errors of my own I noticed that I was getting consonantal forms of words everywhere. Now I realised that I had a bug which I'll fix but I also noticed that this LEX form of verbs in the analysis tab is always consonantal. Other words have vowels. Checking HALOT this morning I find that they explicitly and consciously follow this practice:

 

    A “root”, entered separately so as not to overload the article proper, is always given if a corresponding verb, primary or denominative exists anywhere in Semitic. If it is a verb, the headword is left without vowels; ל׳ה and ל׳א are differentiated, even when tradition has obliterated the differentiation.

“INTRODUCTION TO THE ARAMAIC PART,” HALOT, 1:lxxxv.

 

  I notice that BDB does not follow this practice though and verb entry headwords contain vowels.

 

  Can anyone tell me anything at all about this convention ? Does it stem from concerns about the accuracy of vowels assumed in the case of verbs or some linguistic concern ? It seems odd to do it for just one class of words.

 

Thx

D

[Susan]

Just a guess: verbs are frequently not attested in the qal perfect 3ms (or inf. const. where applicable). In order to stick to this as the conventional lexical form (and conventions are helpful!), one needs to create a form which, particularly for verbs that aren't even attested in the qal, seems artificial. BDB does it anyway and uses brackets. HALOT elects to name the entry by the theoretical root.

 

Of course, occasionally nouns/adjectives are only attested in the plural and/or construct forms, and HALOT does go ahead and create the expected vocalization for the entry (singular absolute), marked with an asterisk. This is less common than it is with verbs, and, perhaps more importantly, the lexical forms of nouns contain unpredictable other-than-root distinctives (as opposed to verbs where the very fact that we can make up the qal perf. 3ms means that we don't need to do so).

 

Also, as a practical matter, if the lexicon followed the verb convention for nouns, one would need to know the root to look it up. (I do realize this is how BDB is alphabetized -- fortunately a trivial detail for Accordance users -- but there's a reason the newer lexicons don't do it this way.)  For verbs, there's no obvious "easier" way to index them. 

 

It's an interesting question -- I'll be curious if somebody who actually knows the answer responds!

Edited June 12, 2016 by Susan

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Thanx for this Susan. Lots of things to think about. The first sentence of your final para. is intriguing. How is knowing the root of a noun harder or less natural than knowing the same for a verb ? If the HALOT headwords for verbs are already theoretical roots one already has this problem for verbs. Perhaps that's the point you mention in your second paragraph "perhaps more importantly, the lexical forms of nouns contain unpredictable other-than-root distinctives". Do you mean that nouns are more subject to changes in the root consonants that verbs are and thus the roots are harder to identify for nouns than verbs ?

 

I'll have to read the front matter in full for both HALOT and BDB, might as well do the concise DCH at the same time.

 

Thx

D

[Susan]

Hi Daniel, I think about this in two directions:

 

1. Root > lexeme: for verbs, this is basically a 1:1 thing if you want to create the qal perf 3ms (accounting for stable morphologic features -- פייה have qamets-qamets, etc.),  with the exception that stative verbs sometimes have a different stem vowel, but nothing too earth-shattering.  So having the root in the lexicon is pretty much equally transparent/informative as that lexical form. (The inflected forms are much more variable, obviously, but still basically predictable.) For nouns, on the other hand, you can look at the root and have no idea what lexemes are possible. Many of them work as segolates (but by no means all, and the vowels vary), many add a he to the end and/or a mem or taw to the beginning; occasionally alephs get thrown around; geminates, nuns, and he's fall off; yod becomes holem-waw;  he becomes yod -- these are all things that happen in various verbal forms as well, but in verbs they occur in predictable patterns and not in the *lexical* form.

 

2. Lexeme > root: this shouldn't be all that difficult for either nouns or verbs, which is (I suppose) why BDB thought it appropriate to alphabetize that way. Still, I think it's harder for nouns than verbs. With the latter, you're working in a system with rules (even if they are fairly complicated and do get broken here and there), and often the context helps determine the stem/inflection, in which case the relationship to the root consists of a known rule. Nouns apparently draw on the same set of morphologic tricks, but there's less predictability about what trick is being played in what context.

 

This all from my rather naive and far-from-fluent Hebrew perspective. For whatever that's worth!

Edited June 12, 2016 by Susan

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Thanx again. More to think on.

 

Thx

D